On the bridge over Dock Creek he met Daniel Offley. He did not esteem him greatly, but he said, "I want to know how I can help a man I have just left."
The two men who disliked each other had then and there their lesson. "I will go with thee." They found the old man dead. As they came out, Offley said, "Come with me, if thee is minded to aid thy fellows," and they went on, talking of the agony of the doomed city.
Hearses and push-carts went by in rows, heavy with naked corpses in the tainted air. Very few well-dressed people were seen. Fashion and wealth had gone, panic-stricken, and good grass crops could have been cut in the desolate streets near the Delaware.
Now and then some scared man, walking in the roadway, for few, as I said, used the sidewalk, would turn, shocked at hearing the Quaker's loud voice; for, as was noticed, persons who met, spoke softly and low, as if feeling the nearness of the unseen dead in the houses. While De Courval waited, Offley went into several alleys on their way, and came out more quiet.
"I have business here," said Offley, as he led the way over the south side of the Potter's Field we now call Washington Square. He paused to pay two black men who were digging wide pits for the fast-coming dead cast down from the death-carts. A Catholic priest and a Lutheran clergyman were busy, wearily saying brief prayers over the dead.
Offley looked on, for a minute silent. "The priest is of Rome," he said, "one Keating—a good man; the other a Lutheran."
"Strange fellowship!" thought De Courval.
They left them to this endless task, and went on, Daniel talking in his oppressively loud voice of the number of the deaths. The imminence of peril affected the spirits of most men, but not Offley. De Courval, failing to answer a question, he said: "What troubles thee, young man? Is thee afeared?"
"A man should be—and at first I was; but now I am thinking of the Papist and Lutheran—working together. That gives one to think, as we say in French."